How Western TV Gets Japanese Culture Wrong
It just feels so alien! So other! So extraordinarily strange!” So said Sue Perkins as she walked across Tokyo’s most crowded zebra crossing in the opening sequence of her travelogue. But shouldn’t this all be more familiar by now?
After all, BBC One’s Japan With Sue Perkins, which aired last month, was only the latest in a long run of British TV programmes inviting us to boggle at the east Asian country. These shows always feature a shot of the aforementioned Shibuya Crossing, items on AI and sumo wrestling, and a concerned interview with an undersexed young man (sometimes called otaku) and/or an overexcited young woman (something to do with kawaii). Only rarely do they offer fresh insight.
At least the upcoming Queer Eye: We’re in Japan! on Netflix and BBC Two’s drama Giri/Haji have obeyed the most basic rule of making British TV about Japan: don’t name it after that slightly racist 1980s hit about masturbation. That’s where Channel 5’s Justin Lee Collins: Turning Japanese went wrong. Or rather, it was the first of many wrong turns in which the since-disgraced comic’s 2011 travelogue erred.
TV’s other orientalist missteps are less daft, but more common. The premise of Queer Eye – five sophisticates makeover a sad-sack – puts Karamo Brown in danger of doing an accidental “Lawrence of Arabia” when he arrives in Tokyo. That is, updating the colonial yarn of the westerner who is eventually accepted by an alien community and then asserts his inherent superiority by embodying the culture better than the locals. Happily, Queer Eye has addressed that risk by including Kiko Mizuhara, a Japanese-American model and Tokyo resident as its guide.
The illuminating presence of Mizuhara is, however, unusual. “British television programmes have a tendency to represent Japanese people as stereotypically odd or kooky, without explaining the cultural context,” says Professor Perry R Hinton, an expert in intercultural communication.
This kind of othering reveals a narrow-mindedness. As Shinichi Adachi, the Japanese-British film-maker behind YouTube culinary series The Wagyu Show explains, Japanese culture isn’t particularly strange, just more accepting of humanity’s strangeness. “They respect people, even if they don’t understand them. People don’t really care if others have weird hobbies.” (...)
“To attract viewers, it’s understandable,” says Chiho Aikman, of the Daiwa Anglo-Japanese Foundation in London, “but the reality of Japanese culture is quite different.” She suggests architecture, regional cuisine (“We don’t just eat sushi!”) and the spread of hate speech as topics that don’t get enough attention. Instead, shows about hikikomori (modern-day hermits) and 40-year-old virgins with huge hentai (manga/anime porn) collections give the impression that subcultures typify an entire nation. In truth, such selections often say more about the audience than they do about the subject. So, if anyone comes out of this looking like socially inadequate, culturally insular, sex-obsessed pervs, well, it’s not the Japanese, is it?
by Ellen E Jones, The Guardian | Read more:
Image: Composite: ITV; Alamy Stock Photo; BBC
[ed. See also: Can We Ever Make It Suntory Time Again? (Longreads).]
It just feels so alien! So other! So extraordinarily strange!” So said Sue Perkins as she walked across Tokyo’s most crowded zebra crossing in the opening sequence of her travelogue. But shouldn’t this all be more familiar by now?
After all, BBC One’s Japan With Sue Perkins, which aired last month, was only the latest in a long run of British TV programmes inviting us to boggle at the east Asian country. These shows always feature a shot of the aforementioned Shibuya Crossing, items on AI and sumo wrestling, and a concerned interview with an undersexed young man (sometimes called otaku) and/or an overexcited young woman (something to do with kawaii). Only rarely do they offer fresh insight.
At least the upcoming Queer Eye: We’re in Japan! on Netflix and BBC Two’s drama Giri/Haji have obeyed the most basic rule of making British TV about Japan: don’t name it after that slightly racist 1980s hit about masturbation. That’s where Channel 5’s Justin Lee Collins: Turning Japanese went wrong. Or rather, it was the first of many wrong turns in which the since-disgraced comic’s 2011 travelogue erred.TV’s other orientalist missteps are less daft, but more common. The premise of Queer Eye – five sophisticates makeover a sad-sack – puts Karamo Brown in danger of doing an accidental “Lawrence of Arabia” when he arrives in Tokyo. That is, updating the colonial yarn of the westerner who is eventually accepted by an alien community and then asserts his inherent superiority by embodying the culture better than the locals. Happily, Queer Eye has addressed that risk by including Kiko Mizuhara, a Japanese-American model and Tokyo resident as its guide.
The illuminating presence of Mizuhara is, however, unusual. “British television programmes have a tendency to represent Japanese people as stereotypically odd or kooky, without explaining the cultural context,” says Professor Perry R Hinton, an expert in intercultural communication.
This kind of othering reveals a narrow-mindedness. As Shinichi Adachi, the Japanese-British film-maker behind YouTube culinary series The Wagyu Show explains, Japanese culture isn’t particularly strange, just more accepting of humanity’s strangeness. “They respect people, even if they don’t understand them. People don’t really care if others have weird hobbies.” (...)
“To attract viewers, it’s understandable,” says Chiho Aikman, of the Daiwa Anglo-Japanese Foundation in London, “but the reality of Japanese culture is quite different.” She suggests architecture, regional cuisine (“We don’t just eat sushi!”) and the spread of hate speech as topics that don’t get enough attention. Instead, shows about hikikomori (modern-day hermits) and 40-year-old virgins with huge hentai (manga/anime porn) collections give the impression that subcultures typify an entire nation. In truth, such selections often say more about the audience than they do about the subject. So, if anyone comes out of this looking like socially inadequate, culturally insular, sex-obsessed pervs, well, it’s not the Japanese, is it?
by Ellen E Jones, The Guardian | Read more:
Image: Composite: ITV; Alamy Stock Photo; BBC
[ed. See also: Can We Ever Make It Suntory Time Again? (Longreads).]
